In order to be able to continuously expand this documentationabout the Alweg monorail system and its historythe author of this website is always looking for any kind of material( such as photos, newspaper articles, personal memories, etc. )about the Alweg monorail.

This website documents the history of the ALWEG monorail system. The ALWEG monorail was developed in Cologne-Fuehlingen in Germany. For various reasons its potential was never recognized in its home-town or -country. In the USA and Japan however monorail technology met and meets with much greater interest. The only original Alweg monorail left in the world is still going strong in Seattle.

The Alweg vision was first introduced to the public in 1952. A short Dutch newsreel film (entitled " The Train of the Future ? ") from that time conveys an impression of how future oriented it looked (its text was immideately and very kindly translated for The Alweg Archives by my good, old friend Rudi K. from Belgium):

“Two German engineers have made the plans of a Swedish multimillionaire come true. They designed and built a totally new type of train that may perhaps bring about a revolution in the railroad industry. It is a train on one rail that runs on ball-bearings* instead of wheels. The model that was just demonstrated on a specially built track in Cologne, is two and a half times smaller than the trains that one hopes to build next year. With this model a speed of 135 kmh was reached. The full-scale train, it is hoped, will be 350 kmh fast. There are already plans to next year build rail-lines for these types of trains in the Belgian Congo and in Southern Rhodesia. In the railroad industry one has taken note of the new invention with great interest, but also with due reserve.”

*Note by Reinhard Krischer: this is probably a linguistic misunderstanding on part of the Dutch journalist; the train rode on ball bearing equipped rollers.

That was in 1952 !And here's a link to a newsreel from Summer 1957,when Alweg introduced its 1:1 scale train in Cologne-Fühlingen:

Since then "experts" try to describe the Alweg concept as a failed technology vision. Because of the massive Alweg opposition Alweg had to abandon ( in the mid-1950s) its plans for high-speed operation.

In May 2009 the most modern Hitachi Alweg monorail started regular public service in Dubai.

In April 2011 Mr. Eran Gartner, President, Systems Division Bombardier Transportation,introduces Bombardier's Innovia 300 monorail at the 59th World Congress and Exhibition of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) in Dubai: